The Designated Mourner comes close to matching the intelligence and wit of My Dinner With André — no easy feat in an era when film audiences crave action and don't have the patience to absorb high-minded dialogue. Through Jack (Nichols), Jack's wife (Richardson) and Jack's father-in-law (de Keyser), Shawn laments the disintegration of high culture. As a newly installed repressive regime violently bears down on the unnamed country's intelligentsia, Jack, a second-rate intellectual, grapples with joining his highbrow wife and father-in-law or slumming it in the totalitarian society the government seeks to create.